But for people to communicate sufficiently such that computers can then in turn communicate and exchange data
to the extent that it means the same thing to the receiving computer as it meant to the sending one is quite novel IMHO.
Moreso the more complex the idea.

Maybe, but I think it;s a pipe dream. Walmart and the EDI brigade thought this sort of computer-computer fully automated communication was possible, until they came up against the real world, and the fact that in the end you're still dealing with abstractions of things humans care about, which means that guess what?! You needed the humans right back in the loop almost every time. The most innocuous manifestation of this was the fragmenting of EDI standards to the point of pulverization.

That was for fairly simple ideas: order/invoice/fulfill. As for actually complex ideas? Ha! Forget it.

XML and Schemas, IMHO, have facilitated this ability vastly.
Before then, Standards which were far less flexable, far fewer, less expressive or far more error prone were used.

Having watched XML/Schema standards for commerce for a while now, I think the practical improvements over trad EDI have been marginal. That's because XML's very real strengths (which IMO do not redound to schemata) are not really geared to solving those particular problems of automation.